Transcription

1 Mark Schroeder University of Southern California August 11, 2015 Knowledge is Not the Most General Factive Stative Attitude In Knowledge and Its Limits, Timothy Williamson conjectures that knowledge is the most general factive stative attitude. According to this conjecture as Williamson formulates it, knowledge is the genus to which other factive stative attitudes, such as remembering, realizing, seeing, and hearing belong. John Hyman [2014] quibbles: knowledge is instead the determinable of which other factive stative attitudes are determinates. On either view, knowledge is a necessary condition for every factive stative attitude. With the exception of Cesare Cozzo [2013], this conjecture has received strikingly little critical attention for being the main positive characterization of knowledge in the twenty-first century s justly most influential book about knowledge. 1 In this note I will argue that knowledge is not a necessary condition for every factive stative attitude, and hence that both Williamson s conjecture and Hyman s substitute for it are false. My arguments against Williamson s conjecture are all based on cases involving factive perceptual attitudes, such as seeing that something is the case or hearing that it is the case. Williamson himself is very clear that some perceptual verbs denote factive stative attitudes. His examples include could feel, could hear, and both saw and could see. 2 Each of these expressions satisfies the earmarks of what Williamson calls a factive mental state operator, or FMSO. In each case, S s that P entails P, so they are factive. Each of these verbs also denotes a state, rather than a process, for which Williamson s test is that the progressive tense is improper, so they are stative. And each ascribes an attitude to a proposition. Williamson s thesis that knowledge is the most general factive stative attitude is the thesis that knows is an FMSO, and that for every FMSO, S s that P entails S knows that P. 1 Cozzo s objection turns on a stipulative counterexample, yig, which is stipulated to carry the right entailment relations. Williamson would presumably object that yig does not satisfy his condition of being semantically unanalyzable. Cozzo anticipates this response, but his response turns on the claim that knows is analyzed in terms of yig, which Williamson would also reject. My arguments in this paper are intended to be cleaner, but share Cozzo s goal of taking on Williamson s conjecture on its own terms, rather than by rejecting the idea that knowledge is a mental state. 2 Note that Williamson focuses on could feel and could hear rather than felt and heard, because the latter express, on at least one disambiguation, attitudes that are not factive. For example, Jack heard that Google stock was up is most naturally interpreted as reporting hearsay, rather than a perceptual relation, and as not being factive. I will set these examples aside in what follows.

2 Williamson also stipulates a fourth condition on FMSOs, that they be semantically unanalyzable. This stipulation is intended to rule out believes truly and other artificial stipulated examples as FMSO s, which would otherwise be counterexamples to the thesis. So strictly speaking, one way to argue that knowledge is not the most general factive stative attitude is to argue that knowledge is semantically analyzable. Another way to argue against Williamson s conjecture is to argue, following Fricker [2009], that knowledge is not a mental state. But I will argue here that Williamson s thesis is flawed, even if his views about the nonanalyzability of knowledge are correct and knowledge really is a mental state. My first argument is simple. It goes like this: P1 Necessarily, if S knows that P, then S believes that P. P2 It is possible that S sees that P but does not believe that P. C Therefore, it is possible that S sees that P but does not know that P. Premise P1 of this argument is part of the philosophical orthodoxy about knowledge, and Williamson himself does not deny it. Indeed, he takes great pains to explain how it could be true that knowledge entails belief, even if belief is not part of the analysis of knowledge. On Williamson s preferred view, belief is to be analyzed in terms of knowledge, rather than conversely, in a way to preserve this entailment. Belief is a state that aims at knowledge. So P1 is a good place for an argument to start. I ll return to the plausibility of P1 and to Williamson s attitude toward it at the close of this note. But premise P2 is also compelling. I ll give several kinds of example. A first kind of example derives from the fact that perception represents many more things than we ever form beliefs about. Suppose that you are walking to your lecture, consumed with an obscure question about Kant interpretation. You pass a classroom with an open door, and see that the door is open, but since you are preoccupied with Kant, you do not form a belief that the door is open. You may remember nothing about the door a moment later, as with most things that you see but do not attend to. Or alternatively, if pressed a few minutes later, you may be able to imaginatively rehearse your walk down the hallway, and come to realize then that you saw that the door was open. Either way, at the time that you see that the door is open, you do not believe that the door is open. What makes examples like this one possible, as I have noted, is that perception represents many more things than we ever attend to or are recorded as beliefs. It follows from this that such examples are not only possible, but they are ubiquitous. Even now, as you read this note, you see that many things are the case without believing them to be the case. A second kind of example in support of premise P2 is also ubiquitous. It turns on the observation that it takes time to form a belief. Even if you believe everything that you see, you

3 see it first. This is a simple consequence of the fact that we are finite creatures with limited cognitive capacities, or more prosaically, that the neural realizers of belief are at least partly downstream from the neural realizers of perceptual states. There is also a third, epistemologically important, kind of case that supports P2. In the two kinds of cases that I have surveyed so far, it is rational for a subject to believe what she sees, but she doesn t either simply not yet, because too few milliseconds have elapsed for the proper neural signals to travel, or because she is attending to something else and can t form beliefs about everything. But it is also possible for a subject to see that P and not believe that P, because even though she sees that P, it is not rational for her to believe that P. This happens, I believe, in cases of subjective perceptual defeat. If you rationally but falsely believe that you are wearing rose-colored glasses, then even if you see that there is something red in front of you, it is not rational for you to believe that there is something red in front of you. If you were wearing rose-colored glasses, then you would not count as seeing that there is something red in front of you. But you are not really wearing rose-colored glasses you just rationally believe that you are. So you really do see that there is something red in front of you. But if you are rational in such a case, you will not believe that there really is something red in front of you. So cases of subjective perceptual defeat are cases in which it is not even rational to believe what you see. You might doubt whether someone who believes that she is wearing rose-colored glasses can really count as seeing that there is something red in front of her. So suppose that you are in this case you are looking at something red, it looks red to you in the normal way, but because you are wearing rose-colored glasses, you suspend belief. I ask you if there is something red in front of you, and you say that you aren t sure. Bewildered by this answer, I point out that you are wearing perfectly good glasses and looking right at them in good lighting. You take off your glasses and realize that the lenses are clear. You say, Oh! I saw that it was red, but since I thought that I was wearing rose-colored glasses, I didn t trust my eyesight. The appropriateness of this report supports the view that you really did see that there was something red in front of you. In contrast, the following, alternative, report does not sound so good: Oh! I couldn t see that it was red, because I thought that I was wearing rose-colored glasses. So I conclude that subjective defeasibility does not undermine seeing something to be the case. This allows us to construct a second argument: P3 Necessarily, if S knows that P, then it is rational for S to believe that P. P4 It is possible that S sees that P but it is not rational for S to believe that P. C Therefore, it is possible that S sees that P but does not know that P.

4 The case of subjective perceptual defeat supports premise P4 as well as premise P2. But our second argument does not rely on premise P1. It relies instead on premise P3. But premise P3 is also independently compelling. I noted above that Williamson does not deny premise P1. But Williamson positively affirms premise P3. According to Williamson [2013], the only rational norm governing belief is to believe only what you know. But from this, P3 follows. Of course, Williamson s grounds for accepting P3 would lead him to reject my example in support of P4. Because he holds that belief is rational just in case it is knowledge, he would deny that it is possible to rationally but falsely believe that you are wearing rose-colored glasses. Still, even on this view, you could believe that it is 99% likely that you are wearing rose-colored glasses. But if this is what you believe, then it is not plausibly rational for you to believe that there is something red in front of you, given only your visual experience as evidence. So my second argument survives. Moreover, even if it is not irrational to believe that there is something red in front of you in this case, it is certainly intelligible for a cautious believer to suspend belief in such a case. So this case can still be used to support P2 of my original argument. Moreover, cases of subjective perceptual defeat support a stronger conclusion. So far I have been arguing only that seeing does not entail knowing. But it is compatible with this thesis, that seeing does entail being in a position to know. But necessarily, if you are in a position to know that P, then it is rational for you to believe that P. This assumption is at least as compelling as premise P3. So cases of subjective perceptual defeat show that seeing does not even entail being in a position to know. In Knowledge and Its Limits, Williamson briefly entertains the possibility that someone might deny that seeing entails believing, or that seeing entails rationality of (he says, justification for ) belief, citing Steup [1992]. Here is what he says: However, such cases put more pressure on the link between knowing and believing or having justification than they do on the link between perceiving or remembering and knowing. If you really do see that it is raining, which is not simply to see the rain, then you know that it is raining; seeing that A is a way of knowing that A [2000, 38]. Here Williamson is saying that he finds it more plausible to reject my premises P1 and P3 than to reject the view that knowledge is the most general factive stative attitude or that seeing counts as a factive stative attitude. But other than simply asserting his view, he gives no reasons why it is more plausible than either P1 or P3, and he goes on to devote much ingenuity to making sense of both P1 and P3. This is hard to understand if Williamson does not find P1 and P3 to be at least prima facie compelling.

5 We should allow that there is something in common between perceptual factive stative attitudes, and we can allow that Williamson may even be right about many of its features perhaps it requires safety and satisfies margin-for-error principles, and perhaps it is a distinctive psychological state that is not shared with hallucinations or illusions. Perhaps it is even a necessary condition, in order to have the kind of evidence that we need in order to have knowledge. Perhaps, in short, Williamson is right about almost everything. But this state is not knowledge. 3 References Cozzo, Cesare [2011]. Is Knowledge the Most General Factive Stative Attitude? In Carlo Celluci, Emiliano Ippoliti, and Emily Grosholtz, eds., Logic and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Fricker, Elizabeth [2009]. Is Knowing a State of Mind? The Case Against. In Patrick Greenough and Duncan Prichard, eds., Williamson on Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Hyman, John [2014]. The Most General Factive Stative Attitude. Analysis 74(4): Steup, Matthias [1992]. Memory. In Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa, eds., A Companion to Epistemology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Williamson, Timothy [2000]. Knowledge And Its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [2013]. Response to Cohen, Comesaña, Goodman, Nagel, and Weatherson on Gettier Cases in Epistemic Logic. Inquiry 56(1): Special thanks to Shyam Nair, Mike McGlone, Jake Ross, Abelard Podgorski, Ben Lennertz, and Daniel Whiting.

1 McDowell and the New Evil Genius Ram Neta and Duncan Pritchard 0. Many epistemologists both internalists and externalists regard the New Evil Genius Problem (Lehrer & Cohen 1983) as constituting an important

Mark Schroeder University of Southern California August 2, 2010 what makes reasons sufficient? This paper addresses the question: what makes reasons sufficient? and offers the answer, being at least as

Diametros nr 28 (czerwiec 2011): 1-7 WHAT DOES KRIPKE MEAN BY A PRIORI? Pierre Baumann In Naming and Necessity (1980), Kripke stressed the importance of distinguishing three different pairs of notions:

A Solution to the Gettier Problem Keota Fields Problem cases by Edmund Gettier 1 and others 2, intended to undermine the sufficiency of the three traditional conditions for knowledge, have been discussed

PRACTICAL REASONING Bart Streumer b.streumer@rug.nl In Timothy O Connor and Constantine Sandis (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action Published version available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444323528.ch31

Epistemic Value and the New Evil Demon B.J.C. Madison (Forthcoming in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly) Draft Version Do Not Cite Without Approval Abstract: In this paper I argue that the value of epistemic

Let s Bite the Bullet on Deontological Epistemic Justification: A Response to Robert Lockie 1 Rik Peels, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Abstract In his paper, Robert Lockie points out that adherents of the

Seeing Through The Veil of Perception * Abstract Suppose our visual experiences immediately justify some of our beliefs about the external world, that is, justify them in a way that does not rely on our

Dogmatism and Moorean Reasoning Markos Valaris University of New South Wales 1. Introduction By inference from her knowledge that past Moscow Januaries have been cold, Mary believes that it will be cold

DAVID HUNTER UNDERSTANDING, JUSTIFICATION AND THE A PRIORI (Received in revised form 28 November 1995) What I wish to consider here is how understanding something is related to the justification of beliefs

Interest-Relativity and Testimony Jeremy Fantl, University of Calgary In her Testimony and Epistemic Risk: The Dependence Account, Karyn Freedman defends an interest-relative account of justified belief

NOÛS 34:4 ~2000! 517 549 The Skeptic and the Dogmatist James Pryor Harvard University I Consider the skeptic about the external world. Let s straightaway concede to such a skeptic that perception gives

In Defense of Radical Empiricism Joseph Benjamin Riegel A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

A Priori Bootstrapping Ralph Wedgwood In this essay, I shall explore the problems that are raised by a certain traditional sceptical paradox. My conclusion, at the end of this essay, will be that the most

The Merits of Incoherence jim.pryor@nyu.edu July 2013 Munich 1. Introducing the Problem Immediate justification: justification to Φ that s not even in part constituted by having justification to Ψ I assume

DISCUSSION NOTE BY JONATHAN WAY JOURNAL OF ETHICS & SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY DISCUSSION NOTE DECEMBER 2009 URL: WWW.JESP.ORG COPYRIGHT JONATHAN WAY 2009 Two Accounts of the Normativity of Rationality RATIONALITY

Practical reason: rationality or normativity but not both John Broome For The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason, edited by Ruth Change and Kurt Sylvan, Routledge 1. Introduction The term practical

Boghossian & Harman on the analytic theory of the a priori PHIL 83104 November 2, 2011 Both Boghossian and Harman address themselves to the question of whether our a priori knowledge can be explained in

Justified Inference Ralph Wedgwood In this essay, I shall propose a general conception of the kind of inference that counts as justified or rational. This conception involves a version of the idea that

Robert Audi, The Architecture of Reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi, 286. Reviewed by Gilbert Harman Princeton University August 19, 2002

Lost in Transmission: Testimonial Justification and Practical Reason Andrew Peet and Eli Pitcovski Abstract Transmission views of testimony hold that the epistemic state of a speaker can, in some robust

Intuition, Self-evidence, and understanding 1 Philip Stratton-Lake Robert Audi s work on intuitionist epistemology is extremely important for the new intuitionism, as well as rationalist thought more generally.

A Defense of the Significance of the A Priori A Posteriori Distinction Albert Casullo University of Nebraska-Lincoln The distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge has come under fire by a

Self-Evidence and A Priori Moral Knowledge Colorado State University BIBLID [0873-626X (2012) 33; pp. 459-467] Abstract According to rationalists about moral knowledge, some moral truths are knowable a

The Myth of Factive Verbs Allan Hazlett 1. What factive verbs are It is often said that some linguistic expressions are factive, and it is not always made explicit what is meant by this. An orthodoxy among

1 Knowledge and its Limits, by Timothy Williamson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xi + 332. Review by Richard Foley Knowledge and Its Limits is a magnificent book that is certain to be influential

Epistemological Disjunctivism and the New Evil Demon BJC Madison (Forthcoming in Acta Analytica, 2013) Draft Version Do Not Cite Without Approval I) Introduction: The dispute between epistemic internalists

1. The Scope of Skepticism Philosophy 5340 Epistemology Topic 4: Skepticism Part 1: The Scope of Skepticism and Two Main Types of Skeptical Argument The scope of skeptical challenges can vary in a number

Chapter Fourteen Is Truth the Primary Epistemic Goal? Justification can take many forms: epistemic, prudential, moral. How can we distinguish between them? The standard answer is that epistemic justification

M.P. LYNCH ZOMBIES AND THE CASE OF THE PHENOMENAL PICKPOCKET ABSTRACT. A prevailing view in contemporary philosophy of mind is that zombies are logically possible. I argue, via a thought experiment, that

PHILOSOPHY 4360/5360 METAPHYSICS Methods that Metaphysicians Use Method 1: The appeal to what one can imagine where imagining some state of affairs involves forming a vivid image of that state of affairs.

Volume 6, Number 1 Gale on a Pragmatic Argument for Religious Belief by Philip L. Quinn Abstract: This paper is a study of a pragmatic argument for belief in the existence of God constructed and criticized

Knowing and Knowledge I. Introduction Though the scope, limits, and conditions of human knowledge are of personal and professional interests to thinkers of all types, it is philosophers, specifically epistemologists,

-1- -2- EPISTEMOLOGY AND METHODOLOGY 3. We are in a physics laboratory and make the observation that all objects fall at a uniform Can we solve the problem of induction, and if not, to what extent is it

THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH IN THE CLASSICAL ANALYSIS OF KNOWLEDGE FILIP V. ROSSI Abstract. In this article I propose a new problem for the classical analysis of knowledge (as justified true belief) and all analyses

KNOWLEDGE AND THE OBJECTION TO RELIGIOUS BELIEF FROM COGNITIVE SCIENCE KELLY JAMES CLARK & DANI RABINOWITZ Calvin College Oxford University Abstract. A large chorus of voices has grown around the claim

CARTESIANISM, NEO-REIDIANISM, AND THE A PRIORI: REPLY TO PUST Gregory STOUTENBURG ABSTRACT: Joel Pust has recently challenged the Thomas Reid-inspired argument against the reliability of the a priori defended

Truth as the aim of epistemic justification Forthcoming in T. Chan (ed.), The Aim of Belief, Oxford University Press. Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen Aarhus University filasp@hum.au.dk Abstract: A popular account

Can the lottery paradox be solved by identifying epistemic justification with epistemic permissibility? Benjamin Kiesewetter Abstract: Thomas Kroedel argues that the lottery paradox can be solved by identifying

Epistemological Motivations for Anti-realism Billy Dunaway University of Missouri St. Louis forthcoming in Philosophical Studies Does anti-realism about a domain explain how we can know facts about the

Phenomenal Conservatism 1 LUCA MORETTI 1. Phenomenal conservatism: the basics 2 Phenomenal conservatism is the view according to which, roughly, the way things seem or appear to be is a source of epistemic

INTERPRETATION AND FIRST-PERSON AUTHORITY: DAVIDSON ON SELF-KNOWLEDGE David Beisecker University of Nevada, Las Vegas It is a curious feature of our linguistic and epistemic practices that assertions about

Understanding and its Relation to Knowledge Christoph Baumberger, ETH Zurich & University of Zurich christoph.baumberger@env.ethz.ch Abstract: Is understanding the same as or at least a species of knowledge?

1 Must we have self-evident knowledge if we know anything? Introduction In this essay, I will describe Aristotle's account of scientific knowledge as given in Posterior Analytics, before discussing some

Reflections on Reasons 1 John Hawthorne and Ofra Magidor [penultimate draft of forthcoming paper in Daniel Star, ed. The Oxford Handbook on Reasons and Normativity; Once the handbook is out, please cite

Meaning and Privacy Guy Longworth 1 University of Warwick December 17 2014 Two central questions about meaning and privacy are the following. First, could there be a private language a language the expressions

Descartes Method of Doubt Philosophy 100 Lecture 9 PUTTING IT TOGETHER. Descartes Idea 1. The New Science. What science is about is describing the nature and interaction of the ultimate constituents of

Philosophical Perspectives, 19, Epistemology, 2005 RESPECTING THE EVIDENCE Richard Feldman University of Rochester It is widely thought that people do not in general need evidence about the reliability

Lingnan University Digital Commons @ Lingnan University Theses & Dissertations Department of Philosophy 2014 Is there a distinction between a priori and a posteriori Hiu Man CHAN Follow this and additional

Matt Weiner Does Knowledge Matter? 1 [This is a draft version of a talk given in Nov. 2005, with slight revisions from April 2006. Please do not treat as a definitive statement of my views.] My question

DOXASTIC CORRECTNESS RALPH WEDGWOOD If beliefs are subject to a basic norm of correctness roughly, to the principle that a belief is correct only if the proposition believed is true how can this norm guide

THE NATURE OF NORMATIVITY IN KANT S PHILOSOPHY OF LOGIC REBECCA V. MILLSOP S I. INTRODUCTION Immanuel Kant claims that logic is constitutive of thought: without [the laws of logic] we would not think at

Forthcoming in Philosophia Christi 13:1 (2011) http://www.epsociety.org/philchristi/ No Dilemma for the Proponent of the Transcendental Argument: A Response to David Reiter James N. Anderson David Reiter

n Cowan, R. (2015) Clarifying ethical intuitionism. European Journal of Philosophy, 23(4), pp. 1097-1116. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult

HAVE WE REASON TO DO AS RATIONALITY REQUIRES? A COMMENT ON RAZ BY JOHN BROOME JOURNAL OF ETHICS & SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY SYMPOSIUM I DECEMBER 2005 URL: WWW.JESP.ORG COPYRIGHT JOHN BROOME 2005 HAVE WE REASON

Sosa on Safety and Epistemic Frankfurt Cases Juan Comesaña 1. Introduction Much work in epistemology in the aftermath of Gettier s counterexample to the justified true belief account of knowledge was concerned

On An Alleged Non-Equivalence Between Dispositions And Disjunctive Properties Jonathan Cohen Abstract: This paper shows that grounded dispositions are necessarily coextensive with disjunctive properties.